Assume-Guarantee (A/G) contracts are a well established paradigm for dealing with large-scale decentralized systems and have a longstanding history and well established theoretical foundations. Its main idea is to decouple dependent decentralized processes, or subsystems, by making use of a set of compatible local contracts consisting of an assumption and a guarantee. If the rest of the system fulfills a process’ assumption, this process must ensure its local guarantee holds, which in turn implies that the corresponding assumptions induced on the others also hold. 

Motivated by these  features, we developed an assume-guarantee synthesis framework for supervisory control of decentralized discrete event systems (see this page discussing the connection between supervisory control and reactive synthesis) which we have also applied to the setting of attack mediation.

Group Members Involved:

• Ana Maria Mainhardt
• Anne-Kathrin Schmuck

Publications:

• A. Mainhardt and A.-K. Schmuck. Synthesis of Decentralized Supervisory Control via Contract Negotiation. 2026. Transactions of Automatic Control  (PDF)
• A. Mainhardt and A.-K. Schmuck. Distributed Contract Negotiation for Decentralised Supervisory Control beyond Two-Components Architectures. 2025. CDC’25.  (PDF)
• A. M. Mainhardt, A. Wintenberg, S. Lafortune, A.-K. Schmuck. Formulating Attacks with Supervisory Control 2024. WODES’24.
• A. Mainhardt and A.-K. Schmuck. Assume-Guarantee Synthesis of Decentralized Supervisory Control. WODES’22. 2022. (extended version) (best student paper award)